Pressure contact arrangements are often used for making electrical contact with large-area semiconductor chips. In this case, one or more semiconductor chips are clamped between two contact pieces to make electrically conductive pressure contact between them. During operation, very high potential differences, for example a few 1000 volts or even more than 10,000 volts can be present at the contact pieces. In order to avoid voltage flashovers which may occur owing to these high potential differences, some pressure contact modules are filled with an inert gas, but this requires a hermetically gas-tight module housing. Such a housing involves a degree of complexity which is not inconsiderable both for the production and maintenance of such a module.
Instead of an inert gas, a pressure contact module can also be cast with an electrically insulating casting compound only after production of the electrical pressure contacts. The commercial casting compounds generally used for this purpose usually contain silicone oil, however, which is associated with the disadvantage that the oil, over the course of time, creeps between the contact faces of the pressure contact connection and thus increases the electrical contact resistance. A further disadvantage results in the fact that the semiconductor chips need to be positioned very precisely relative to the contact pieces. Therefore, the semiconductor chips are often provided in cutouts of positioning devices, which should only have low tolerances with respect to the semiconductor chips. This means that there are gaps with a very small width between the positioning device and the semiconductor chips, and these gaps cannot be filled reliably during casting with casting compound. As such there a high risk of voltage flashovers occurring in the case of the cast module, as a result of which the already finished module as a whole becomes unusable.